DBus Activation for apps in prefix

On my systems I noticed that some services like kglobalaccel are not automatically started when logging into the system. This is on the one hand rather annoying on the other it could indicate a bug in our setup. So this morning I started to look into the issue with kglobalaccel.

Kglobalaccel is a service which is supposed to get started through dbus. My installation prefix is “/opt/kf5″ and so the service file gets installed to “/opt/kf5/share/dbus-1/services/org.kde.kglobalaccel.service” – that looks fine. After some investigation I figured out that dbus-daemon looks in $XDG_DATA_DIRS as a search path. Our startkde script adjusts $XDG_DATA_DIRS to include /opt/kf5/share before launching the dbus daemon. But when looking at the environment of the running dbus-daemon one could see the problem: it doesn’t use the set environment variable. The reason is obvious: dbus is nowadays started before the desktop environment gets started.

This means D-Bus doesn’t know where to look for the service files. To fix this create a file “/etc/dbus-1/session.d/plasma-next.conf” with the following content (adjust path as needed):